You're reading the documentation for a version of ROS 2 that has reached its EOL (end-of-life), and is no longer officially supported. If you want up-to-date information, please have a look at Galactic.

Roadmap

This page describes planned work for ROS 2. The set of planned features and development efforts should provide insight into the overall direction of ROS 2. If you would like to see other features on the roadmap, please get in touch with us at info@openrobotics.org.

Galactic Roadmap

Galactic Geochelone is the ROS 2 release expected in May 2021. See release for a detailed timeline.

The items in the roadmap below are the major features being worked on by the ROS 2 community. Note that the table is in priority order; the higher in the list they are, the more important they are. The “Size” is an estimated size of the task, where S means person-days to complete, M means person-weeks to complete, and L means person-months to complete.

If you are working on a feature for ROS 2 Galactic and would like to have it listed, please open a pull request to ROS 2 Documentation. If you’d like to take on one of these tasks, please get in touch with us.

Task	Size	Owner	Expected Completion
Middleware: Improve DDS service reliability	Medium	ADLINK, eProsima, and Open Robotics	1st quarter 2021
Middleware: Default middleware selection	Large	Open Robotics	Complete
Middleware: Improve DDS fully-connected overhead	Small	ADLINK, eProsima, and Open Robotics	1st quarter 2021
Documentation: Consolidate ROS 2 documentation in an easy to find/search place	Large	Open Robotics	4th quarter 2020
Documentation: Automatically generate and host per-package documentation	Large	Open Robotics	4th quarter 2020
Middleware: Switch to CycloneDDS as default RMW vendor	Small	ADLINK and Open Robotics	1st quarter 2021
Galactic Release	Large	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2021
Quality: Add code coverage checks to CI for packages that are QL 1	Medium	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2021
Quality: Keep builds on ci.ros2.org and build.ros2.org green	Medium	Open Robotics and everyone	ongoing
rosbag2: Improve sqlite3 backend performance	Small	Apex and others	Complete
rosbag2: Separate threads for queueing messages and writing to disk	Small	Apex and others	Complete
rosbag2: Record /clock topic	Medium
Performance: Reduce the performance overhead of executors	Large
Quality: Turn on more compiler warnings	Small	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2021
Quality: Increase testing coverage of C/C++ packages	Large
Documentation: More intermediate/advanced tutorials	Medium	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2021
Quality: Quality Level 1 declaration up to rclcpp	Large	Open Robotics	Complete
Features: Specific demo to show public adoption of ROS 2	Medium	PickNik Robotics (with Hello Robot ‘Stretch’)
ROS 1 -> ROS 2 Porting: Enhance documentation to ease porting from ROS 1	Small
Quality: Setup configuration so packages can opt-in to clang-tidy for build.ros2.org PR builds	Small
Quality: Setup configuration so packages can opt-in to scan-build for build.ros2.org PR builds	Small	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2021
Quality: Enable scan-build for core package PR builds	Medium	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2021
Launch: Rewrite launch_testing to be a pytest extension	Medium
Launch: Re-enable previously disabled tests in launch	Medium
Features: Make multi-robot configurations easier to setup and use with ROS 2	Medium	Open Robotics	1st quarter 2021
Quality: Increase testing coverage of Python packages	Large
Quality: Create and maintain an asan job on ci.ros2.org for the ROS 2 core packages	Large
Quality: Create and maintain a tsan job on ci.ros2.org for the ROS 2 core packages	Large
Quality: Create and maintain a ubsan job on ci.ros2.org for the ROS 2 core packages	Large
Quality: Create and maintain a valgrind job on ci.ros2.org for the ROS 2 core packages	Large
Middleware: Evaluate middlewares other than DDS	Large
Middleware: Documentation for implementing new RMWs	Medium
Tech Debt: Rewrite rclpy to use pybind11	Large

Quarterly Roadmap

Product Readiness is the current focus topic for ROS 2. Over the next two quarters we will concentrate development efforts on topics that make ROS 2 more suitable for use in production scenarios. This includes improving the out-of-box experience for common use cases, documentation improvements, and addressing disparities between ROS 1 and ROS 2.

## 2020 Q3(Jul - Sep)

• Transport Documentation and Configurations: Describe and document the ROS 2 transport system. Provide default configurations for common uses cases along with documentation. Tracking ticket.

## 2020 Q4(Oct - Dec)

• Performance Improvements: Analyze rcl*-level performance and resource usage. Develop a strategy to improve performance and reduce resource usage based on data from the analysis. Tracking ticket.

• Launch: Address current shortcoming in launch, and improve launch testing. Tracking ticket.

• Documentation Infrastructure: Develop package-level documentation generation infrastructure, deploy documentation, and consolidate existing documentation. Tracking ticket.

Planned releases

Please see the Distributions page for the timeline of and information about future distributions.

Contributing to ROS 2

Looking for something to work on, or just want to help out? Here are a few resources to get you going.

1. The Contributing guide describes how to make a contribution to ROS 2.

2. Check out the list of Feature Ideas for inspiration.

3. For more information on the design of ROS 2 please see design.ros2.org.

4. The core code for ROS 2 is in the ros2 GitHub organization.

5. The Discourse forum/mailing list for discussing ROS 2 design is ng-ros.

6. Questions should be asked on ROS answers, make sure to include at least the ros2 tag and the rosdistro version you are running, e.g. ardent.